Friday, March 25, 2016

Polished, Unpolished & Mid-Polish

So there's just one show left for the Gets Straight To The Point* (*The Powerpoint) tour... well, actually, as I type, there are three, it's just that there's only one you can still get tickets for: the show takes it's final bow at the Royal Festival Hall on March 31st.

As the tour ends, I'm normally asked whether or not there will be a DVD. There won't. I wrote this about the tour before this one... but the explanation's exactly the same.

This will be the fifth season - I've been doing them since 2011 - and I'm delighted to announce that the shows are returning to their original home; Hoxton Hall. The venue was out of commission for a couple of years while they went through a major refurb but the atmosphere at Hoxton Hall was always something special so it's great to be going back.

The Screen Guild is my new material playground. It's where I try out new ideas while hosting a show with four guest acts that I know are brilliant. All the material from the tour... and from the tour before that... and most of the material that's made up the first 22 hours of Modern Life is Goodish was given its first airing at the Screen Guild. It really has been that fundamental to all that I've done in the last few years.

There's more information as to the what and why of these shows on my website so I'll just tell you that, as it stands, we've scheduled four shows for this season. They are:

FRIDAY, APRIL 15TH
FRIDAY, MAY 20TH
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22ND
THURSDAY, JULY 14TH... and tickets for all four are available here.

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If a tour show is where I display the material that's been fully honed and the Screen Guild is where things are hopefully unearthed - well then there's another sort of show I do that's all about doing the actual polishing.

For Modern Life Is Goodish to work it has to feel composed. It can't just be some disparate bits of material... it all has to hang together. There may be different threads in an episode, but at some point they will always coalesce.

That means that the show we record has to be as close to the finished product as it can be. We can't film 90 minutes and cut it down to an hour in the edit without undoing all the connections.

So before every recording I run the shows live a few times, making changes between each run, working out where the ad breaks will be and generally honing the stuff as best I can. I do them in batches and work on two episodes at a time.

Series four must be happening because we have these booked in already.